Method

Fry the garlic, add tomato and lemongrass, add 2 Tbsp water, stirring. After a couple of minutes add half fish sauce, sugar and aubergine. Add 1 cup water and rest of fish sauce and sugar, add turmeric, pepper and the stalk of the lemongrass (if you are using the real thing). Simmer for about 7 more minutes till the aubergine is cooked, garnish with chilli, spring onions and basil (or other herbs like corriander)

For my current research project I am experimenting with substitutions with the aim of producing the healthiest chocolate treat ever.

I am using my standard chocolate muffin recipe as the starting and reference point.

My first step is was radical, I substituted avocado for the fat, milk and egg. Aiming at Vegan as well as healthy. So far results are encouraging the muffins are soft, almost creamy and chocolaty. (Just needing a little salt – hopefully not enough t be unhealthy – to counteract the vegetarian bitterness of the avocado.)

Replacing half the chocolate chips with cocoa nibs also worked well.

Now, what I need next is a sugar substitute. Would honey work do you think? And does Manuka honey retain its health benefits when heated?

While I’ve been here in Sri Lanka by a crude meal count I have not managed to be a “Repentant Carnivore”. In fact even including breakfasts I have only eaten one Vegan meal – breakfast on Sunday I made for myself, Marmite in hot water and some bananas 😉

Every other meal included meat, fish or eggs. Even today, a Buddhist holiday when Sri Lankans eat no meat, meals included fish or eggs.

And yet… Rice and curry (perhaps the Sri Lankan staple) is mainly rice, with some veges and a curry sauce with a small piece of fish or chicken or an egg. Biriyani similarly managed loads of flavour from rice with spices veges and fruit with a small piece of meat. Modern Western meals are stuffed with meat, cheese, eggs, fish… and see the carbs and veges as secondary, Fish and Chips rather than Rice and Curry.

We need to rethink how we cook. Work out ways to do more with less (at least less of those high demand animal protein rich products). Our ancestors did it, a “real” Cornish Pasty had half the meat a modern one does, and was just as filling and probably better for us…

A bobby calf. Since he was born male he will be taken away the day of his birth so humans can drink his milk (from Veganism is the Future)

We bought a great job lot of books (gardening and vegetarian cooking) on TradeMe. They will be really useful as we extend the vege patch and should provide a different range of recipes. However, even a first look at the recipe books reveals how much milk, cheese and eggs Vegetarians habitually use. Unlike Vegans (who require no animals to be killed or mistreated) or even moderate Carnivores (who only require a few), Vegetarianism on a large scale requires massive cruelty to animals.

NZ Farmers’ Weekly “anticipated 1.8 million bobby calves processed this winter”. 1“Processed” here means animals just a few days old being herded into cattle trucks and shipped to the slaughterhouse.

For cows to produce milk, they have to give birth to a calf every year. Most calves are separated from the cows within twelve hours of birth to reduce the risk of disease, and most do not stay on the farm for long….

Bobby calves are housed together and fed colostrum, milk or milk replacer, usually only once a day. They are then sold, mostly for slaughter, at five days old. Products from processed calves include young veal for human consumption, valuable hides for leather and byproducts for the pharmaceutical industry….

Because they will very soon go to slaughter, bobby calves often do not get the same standard of housing, cleanliness, care or attention as the valuable replacement heifers or the bull calves being reared for veal. For their health and welfare, bobby calves should be fed twice a day and be housed in sheltered, clean and dry environments with room to lie down on suitable bedding.

A moderate carnivore who eats only a little cheese and does not drink much milk probably requires few if any Bobby Calves to be slaughtered, we feed them up for a year or two and then eat them. But vegetarians do not eat beef, but they do drink milk and eat cheese.

It’s much the same with eggs, even the most moderate egg eater produces some cockerels that somebody has to eat. At least in their case a free range cockerel gets a decent life before the pot…

I don’t know what you make of it, but my conclusion is clear:

Vegans do not harm animals

Moderate carnivores slaughter a few animals, but after they have had a decent life and are grown up

Vegetarians slaughter loads of baby calves and their treatment seems cruel and malicious

If any Vegetarian can defend their morality I’d be delighted to hear it. Until then I can only plead with you, if you don’t like meat then learn to eat Vegan!

Cover the dried mushrooms in hot water and soak (c15 mins), drain them.

Chop the onion and garlic finely. In a heavy saucepan big enough to take the full recipe, heat the olive oil and fry chopped onion and garlic (use a low heat, the idea is to sweat them until soft, not turn them to carbon). Chop the fresh mushrooms and fry them also for a few minutes. Add the rice and stir to coat. Add wine and simmer, stirring often. When it has been absorbed add stock a little at a time. Keep stirring! Add stock (Remember it is important that this is hot, we don’t want to shock the poor little rice grains do we?) till the rice is tender.

Chop and add the porcini and parsley. Season and add the extra oil (or butter and Parmesan).

Again the photo is not our meal, I must get in the habit of taking shots of my food 🙁 so, photo by jbcurio

One of the most pleasant Vegan lunches is breads and dips, most often when it’s just the two of us it is bread and dips, but several breads or toasts do help make it more special. The recipes are simple, keep well in the frig, and cheap too 🙂

For lunch today we had hummus, skordalia, some olive oil with a little fruity balsamic at the bottom, and Miriam’s competition recipe Guacomole.

Miriam’s Vegan Guacamole

1 perfectly ripe avocado (you can tell it’s perfect when then little knobbly bit where it used to be attached to the tree comes off easily when you nudge it gently-ish with your thumb).

1/4 onion/red onion or one shallot or a couple of spring onions cut into tiny little pieces.

Mash up the avocado with a fork, mix everything else in, add more lemon juice etc to taste.

I omitted the hot sauce, though I got quite used in Africa to adding chili paste to my meals I don’t like to add a little chili to everything as so many Kiwis do, I also reduced the salt, making a healthy dip even more healthy.

Cooked green lentils (photo by Maggie Hoffman) when you add the oil they'll glisten scrunptiously, the sausage is icing on the cake 😉

This recipe is NOT Vegan, except Vegans can easily adapt it by removing the sausage and adding a little more oil and salt.This is simpler than the public as imagined by a politician, and tastier than even you could imagine (just use plenty of good oil and real ground or flaky salt added just before eating)

Green lentils 1/2 cup per person (boiled gently till just soft)

Splash or three of nice olive oil

Several grinds of sea salt

a little thinly sliced sausage (Chorizo is good, but I prefer the thin ones that taste a bit like salami)

Serve with mashed potatoes.

For myself I often leave the sausage out, but it used to help tame the family carnivores 😉 and does add a nice contrast.

Our busy weekend reveals another difficulty with trying to cut back meat, eggs and (possibly) dairy. We were rushing from place to place so we only had 2-3 meals (including breakfasts) at home over the weekend, one lunch was fish and chips (the only other option in that part of town was a meat pie), though one cafe meal was mushrooms few cafes have more than one vegan (or even quasi-Vegan) meal on offer.

In Auckland we could have gone to Cosset, but eating out on busy days may prove difficult 🙁

Well perhaps not, but I thought that quote from Isaiah 55.1 was appropriate since that’s what it can seem like when trying to eat less meat and animal products. It seems like there is dairy everywhere, flowing with milk and honey indeed!

Just after Tim’s most recent post about dairy and its relationship to being a repentant carnivore, I realized just how big of a deal dairy is. Over this past week I’ve been out and about a lot. I’ve been at family and church gatherings and also been caught having to eat at restaurants a number of times. When it comes to family and church gatherings I think these situations are probably most difficult for meat avoidance. At one family gathering this past week, it was either eat meat or virtually nothing at all (my wife’s family had a crawfish boil, though I’m not sure about the ecology of eating crawfish).

In the case of eating out, I am realizing that vegetarian eating decisions are sometimes fairly easy to make while vegan ones often are not (There are no restaurants that I know of with vegan offerings anywhere within about a 45 minute drive from my home). The reason for this is that many of the vegetarian dishes that I have seen, at least at the restaurants I have eaten at recently, contain cheese or some other dairy product as a primary ingredient.

One meal that I ate was at a microbrewery that is also a restaurant. I mainly go there for the beer 😉 (and please no one tell me that beer is ecologicially bad, I’m not sure I could bear that this early on in trying to make a change), but my wife likes the food. Oddly enough, there they had several vegetarian style offerings (Based on past experiences I would normally not expect a brewhouse to be so sensitive). Yet in each case the vegetarian offerings had cheese as one of the primary ingredients. So, I did the best I could. I ordered the personal size vegetarian pizza. I suppose I could have asked them to hold the cheese, but I’m not sure how appetizing that would have been.

In another case, my wife and I ate at our local Greek and Lebanese restaurant called Albasha. I like Albasha’s fare because many of the dishes that I like are devoid of meat. However, once again everything usually comes with some sort of yogurt sauce or dressing. I ordered the falafel sandwich. It had a bit of a creamy tahini sauce on it and it came with feta salad, but I did feel better about it than the vegetarian pizza.

I guess these experiences just reinforced that one’s decision about dairy can be a really important one and one that I have been thinking a great deal about…